Is Overwatch losing its players?

Yes it is. They haven’t released good content in a while and their latest changes to heroes have done nothing but make everyone angry, because they’ve been based on the design team’s own subjective opinions about the state of heroes instead of objective data and high tier feedback which has made the balance in this game garbage. We keep asking for balance changes to Rein, Ana, Mercy, Doomfist, Ashe, Roadhog, Junkrat, Orisa, Wrecking Ball, Pharah, Mei and Torbjörn but nothing has changed and the overall attitude has been that they don’t really intend to balance these heroes. In fact many players now fear any changes to heroes because Mercy got decimated because they wanted to enforce changes in the support roster, Pharah got shut on for absolutely no reason, DF got the usual “let’s just nerf it to the ground” treatment Blizzard™ and latest Brigitte changes have made everyone go “???”. Symmetra player’s got lucky that some dev decided to get her latest buffs through the team.

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Yes.

The current mayhem used to be fairly common here and didnt need a coordinated effort because a lot more people posted regularly and were still very passionate about the game. Now its just a select few.

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Because games have a deadline for release.

Team 4 works for a company. They agree upon a deadline from their bosses. The game is budgeted to release by X date so that it can make the money invested into it back. Delaying the game further wouldn’t have been an option and the Dev. Team doesn’t get that call just to include a feature.

So they would have had to leave out another feature to include it.

Especially since all features in this game have to be coded from scratch. 0 assets can be used from other games due to all of the proprietary engines that only Overwatch uses.

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Overwatch is losing a lot of players because Blizzard doesn’t know how to balance the game. It’s also because they keep on recycling events.

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I feel like two particular patches had wide spread and lasting damage on player numbers: The Mercy rework (on both sides of the aisle) and the patch that brought Brigitte.

Besides that, while not on such a large scale, there’s been a lot of smaller upsets and with such a severe drought of content…Well, they certainly aren’t pulling anyone back.

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I’ve been a mercy main from the beginning but the game feels so weak right now I find myself playing other games way more often now.

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I left because of Symmetra’s rework and the recent terrible balance patches. They’re nerfing heroes that don’t need to be nerfed.

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This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what an engine is.

Engines handle rendering, physics, audio, and netcode.

Everything else (menus, surround audio, and social features) either uses an intermediary third party middleware like Autodesk Scaleform and Dolby Atmos, or uses an in-house developed API/library.

Unity and Unreal just happen to ship with their own middleware, which then developers have created marketplace plugins for barest essential features…

Blizzard themselves have built their own API for chat and social features, which they then used to integrate into other games – that’s why Black Ops 4 and Destiny 2 also have the same features shared across Battle net. Blizzard Voice is also another API they’ve developed, though it hasn’t been used for Overwatch due to the overlap with voice chat.

They didn’t have to rework Overwatch’s text chat system from scratch, they just had to tailor it to Overwatch.

Guilds/clans support, and a replay system, are the two known features that they’re building from scratch.

Also, Blizzard outsources art regularly, so its not something that they bitten off more than they can chew.

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Again this is my opinion, even if they had to choose to leave out something, a social feature to build the community should have been at the top of the list. Even in the first year when the game was still fresh. Now it’s too late in my opinion.

Other than the lack of new events, a large portion of people are quitting because their friends lists are empty because the people they knew quit.

A guild or clan system would’ve easily prevented this, by building multiple communities and growing the player base.

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Blizzard has a big issue in that people won’t even use guilds/clans this late into the life cycle.

All of the major Overwatch communities already have their own subreddit, Discord servers, Facebook groups, and text chats.

Blizzard not only has to make the guild/clan system working, but has to have something compelling enough to make all of those groups migrate over from their established communities to Blizzard’s social features.

They also have to be wary, that a lot of these groups that already have established names, are going to get screwed.

There has to be more than one Discord server named “Genji Mains” out there, so when the guilds/clans actually launch you’ll be stuck wondering which group will actually lay claim to that Guild name.

And heaven forbid there be a guild name that’s just completely disallowed (for any reason, not just inappropriate language).

These features have to debut alongside something else that ties into them to make it worth the time and effort to migrate.

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Seems like it. I mean me and my friends rarely play overwatch anymore.

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Players (From my list) migrated to PUBG, and I believe even more players migrated to Fortnite.

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I think retaining interest is hard, especially when events are recycled and the only thing that ever really changes are cosmetics and occasionally a new hero. I finally started to lose interest at the tail end of last year after solid dedication since the game launched, and it really just boils down the the fact that there are new and exciting games out there and Overwatch is definitely not one of them.

I’m curious to see how much more popularity it’s going to continue to lose in the next few years. I remember reading a statement or something where the creators were like ‘we want Overwatch to be the game you can come back to after big hitters like Fortnite lose popularity’ and I thought it was funny, because the past few years really haven’t made the game something most people want to come back to. There’s been so much discourse surrounding Overwatch and Blizzard as a whole that the future of the game seems murky at best to me.

All that being said, I have been dabbling in quick play for a few hours a week lately and the only upside of the game slowly dying is that the people playing generally seem to be veterans and it’s not as hard to get a decent team.

The biggest things that hurt the game are pretty much as follows for most people here:

  1. Slow AF development cycle for literally everything
  2. Balance decisions that make zero sense
  3. Bad/flawed reworks
  4. Events feel stale now since it’s the 3rd time around with no real changes
  5. No developer interaction unless your a streamer “interviewing” a dev (AKA reading scripted questions that lead nowhere/address no conserns)

I personally pretty much stopped playing when Mercy got reworked; tried it on the PTR and knew it wasn’t going to end well.

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I have played with nine different RL friends in this game, and every single one of them has quit out of lack of interest. I don’t know what more I can do to keep them invested. The newest friend quit at level 16.

Iv lost interest concidering the recent changes. I have been trying other games.

That’s already going on for a bit longer than that, however it might’ve accelerated from that point onwards (wasn’t that around Brig’s release?)

A number of things have caused me to lose some interest even if I still play it a lot.

Lore was a selling point for me, when the first trailer hit this game brimmed with potential. It’s really slow going, and I was hoping for a fleshed out campaign kinda mode; archieves just needs to be permanently added into the game.

A lack of a que that is more in line with ranked mode, but is not solo q. This threw me off so bad that I lost my groove when I first went in, and just do not like that transition so I now avoid this (and I avoid competitive modes in general). My only insensitive now feels like golden guns, a border, and longer ques.

My mains being either trash tier, hated, reworked or dumpstered really hits me hard. I have been told off, laughed at, made fun of, and given little respect throughout the entirety of my game play. Even when out performing, I have still gotten this (Though I will admit it has gotten better, it still crops up and more around events). I main Sym and DF, and will continue to do so.

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It would be interesting to see an active player graph to correlate with patches. But yeah, ever since the WoD disaster Blizzard refuses to report active numbers for any of their games. Instead they keep boasting with their peak numbers or completely unrepresentative total numbers. :confused:

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Eventhough I love Overwatch, I have stopped playing it after the last patch. I was in Comp, had a descent game but asked myself: “Why do I play it? Every game is exactly the same, contest a point or move a payload, nothing else. An enemy reaper pocketed by Mercy and basically the same characters in every game.”

The game is very good, don’t get me wrong. But it feels like it has run out of Juice for me and probably many other players, it has gotten stale and boring, with a new hero release being the only thing that puts any kind of spark into it